A visitors at the RideLondon cycling show at the ExCel centre in east London. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

An eclectic cast of cyclists – from London's mayor, Boris Johnson, to race organisers and Olympic champions – have hailed this weekend's RideLondon event in the capital as an important staging post in Britain's transition to a cycling nation.

The event, which takes place over two days and climaxes on Sunday with the London-Surrey Classic 140-mile elite race featuring Team Sky and other professional riders and a 100-mile mass participation ride for 20,000 people, has been described as "the London marathon on wheels".

Both the elite and the mass participation events will start in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, close to the velodrome where Britain's riders delivered unprecedented success a year ago, and loop out into Surrey before finishing on the Mall.

Organisers believe the ambitious event, which was hugely oversubscribed and also features a recreational family ride on the Saturday, will demonstrate the extent to which cycling's popularity has soared over the past decade.

"I think people are more and more turned on to cycling. There's been a massive change in people's attitudes to cycling generally. You still get some people who are very hostile but I think the public is now ready for the next great leap forwards," said Johnson, who has entered the 100-mile "sportive" event.

"I'm not normally a Maoist in my approach to government, but what we need now is a revolution. I want people's mindset about cycling to be the same as you find in Amsterdam, or Berlin, or Copenhagen. There's no reason at all why we shouldn't."

Hugh Brasher, the event organiser who is also race director of the London Marathon, said it was the largest inaugural mass participation event in the world, and the complexity of the various events – also including a handcycle race and a women's elite race – combined with the road closures made it a challenge to deliver.

He said the event could not have happened a decade ago. A combination of serendipity, hard work and judgment had allowed British Cycling to create a virtuous circle between elite success and increased grassroots participation, he said.

"We're almost coming to a crescendo now: we won the Olympics pitch in 2005, then there was the success of the British cycling team in Beijing, which inspired people on the bikes. Now we have what London is doing as a city in terms of commuters, trying to be like Amsterdam.

"Then there was the success at London 2012 and Bradley Wiggins in the Tour de France. You've got a whole host of things that come together. We couldn't be launching this at a better time. To an extent there's a bit of luck in that, but there's also a lot of planning."

Jonny Clay, British Cycling's director of cyclesport, who won an Olympic bronze alongside Wiggins at the Sydney Games in 2000, could be among the first 100 finishers in Sunday's sportive.

"RideLondon is more evidence of the boom in cycling in this country – the sport has never been in better health. It is exactly the kind of event we want to encourage – one that is not just about elite competition but also helps to grow the sport," said Clay, adding that the number of sportives or challenge rides had surged 34% since 2012.

There is confidence among those at the sharp end – entrepreneurs who have grown their businesses off the back of the recent boom in cycling – that it is sustainable. Nick Hussey, a fanatical cyclist for more than 20 years who now runs Vulpine, a firm selling casual cycling clothes, recounts his youthful impressions of the pursuit. "It was a tiny, tiny sport and ultra cliquey, full of people who talked about gear ratios all weekend. Cyclists were basically racers or you rode to the shops. There wasn't much else."

Now cycling has become so mainstream that shortly before he launched Vulpine a multinational sports company offered to buy up the entire concept, he said.

"They phoned me up and they said: 'We know that we don't get cycling and we don't have any authenticity. We need somebody to tell us how to do it.'"

Hussey's firm is thriving, while a series of major clothing brands including Levi's and H&M have launched their own bike-related ranges. Hussey says: "Cycling 10 years ago was very male, very cliquey, geeky, full of sporty clothing. Now it's more of a lifestyle, an access route to various other kinds of enjoyment. The litmus test is if you open a fashion magazine. You know cycling is cool because Vogue will do a photoshoot and put a lady with a fixie. It's for no apparent reason – she'll be wearing some enormous dress that's impossible to cycle in, but she'll be holding a bike."

Much of the boom is associated with road cycling, says Carlton Reid, who runs Bikebiz.com. "Previously we had mountain bikes, but now they're dead in the water. No one can shift them out of their shops at the moment. It's all road bikes of £500-plus."

Many buyers are middle class, middle-aged men investing in pricey carbon fibre machines, he says. "It's such a cliché, but clichés have got a basis in fact: cycling is the new golf." I don't even like saying the phrase but it's so true. You see the two sports portrayed on TV and you think: as an executive, which would you buy into?"

Chris Hoy, the six-time Olympic gold medallist, says cycling is a more inclusive sport than the cliche suggests. "You don't have to spend £10,000 on a bike. And once you've got it, that's you. Compared to most sports, it's very accessible, very open. People from all backgrounds, of all abilities, of all shapes and sizes do it. It's a sport for all, it's certainly not a middle class sport," he says.

Booms have happened before – bike sales surged in the UK and US after the 1973 oil crisis and, as now, there were attendant calls for proper cycling infrastructure on the roads. But within a couple of years the market crashed. This time there are established cycling "tribes", Reid says: "One part can fail and another will take over. It is this more resilient market now."

It remains a notably male-dominated pursuit. Woman make little more than a quarter of all journeys by bike in the UK, and their representation in road cycling events is lower still. This is not because women don't want to cycle, according to Glynis Francis, who set up a south Manchester-based women's cycling club, Team Glow, in 2011.

Instead, she says, many are put off by the sometimes macho and competitive atmosphere of male-dominated clubs: "If I had a pound for every time a woman said 'I'm a bit worried about holding everybody up', I'd be a very wealthy woman. They come out and ride with us. They know we're not going to leave them in the middle of nowhere. We help people out with mechanicals and punctures. When woman are introduced to road cycling with all the right conditions, they fly."

Francis, 59, who only took up serious cycling herself in her 40s and is now a British track racing champion for her age group, says the demand is there: her club began with seven paid members and now has more than 70. She says: "We're not just out in frocks, going for cups of tea. We are the full spectrum of speeds. But we do it thoughtfully."

Francis carried out an audit of women's cycling groups in the north-west for British Cycling – which she calls "appalling" at supporting women – and found 15 groups spanning 1,000 riders.

The bike industry is viewed by many as similarly patronising to female riders, often producing a limited range of scaled-down bikes and accessories mainly distinguished by their colour palette – the so-called "shrink it and pink it" approach.

Hussey recalls being urged not to bother making women's clothing when he launched Vulpine. When he did, the items sold out "within days" and he realised the error. "I think there's actually more potential in women's cycling than there is in men's. Why on earth is women's cycling so badly catered for, across the board? Nobody really seems to have caught on to this."

Francis is similarly scathing about retailers, recounting her experiences at the Evans store inside Manchester's National Cycling Centre, the base for the British Olympic team. "They've got the most pathetic collection of women's and bikes clothes in there," she says.

British Cycling would point to its attempts to grow women's leisure cycling through a network of national Breeze clubs, which arrange informal all-female rides to introduce women to the sport, and its success in bringing elite female riders through the system.

The gender divide at the top of the sport has become a huge issue in light of a campaign – led by the Ironman competitor Chrissie Wellington and British rider Emma Pooley among others – to reintroduce a women's Tour de France . A petition to the organisers of the men's race has reached more than 87,000 signatures.

As for the London mayor, he said he merely hoped to complete the course, and did not expect a record-breaking time. "The chiselled whippet is in there somewhere, but the sculptor has yet to find him. He may emerge in the course of the next few days," Johnson said.

"The strategy is just going to be to keep going at a reasonable pace, if I possibly can. It's not the length of time, it's the speed I'm a bit worried about. I'm not going to streak like a greased panther."